Do COVID Vaccines Work? (part 1)

In this article I utilise A&E admissions data for 2017 – 2021 for an unknown NHS Trust to examine the impact of vaccination rollout on respiratory illness

This morning I want to do something hairy and that is to attempt to assess the impact of COVID vaccination on respiratory admissions without resorting to statistical modelling. Yes indeed, I've gone soft in the head!

The ‘never vaccinated’ vs. ‘ever vaccinated’ classification saga continues, with authorities bending figures out of shape and generally doing odd things with definitions, presumably to avoid revealing an awkward truth that would compromise the government and its diabolical vaccination programme.

Fudging vaccination status is most certainly not the case with the analyses I am about to present for I can ascertain whether somebody was jabbed prior to admission to A&E or not. In my book if a needle went into a person’s arm even hours beforehand then that A&E admission will count as vaccinated. No funny business, no waiting for 14 days for ‘immunity’ to develop, no glossing over harm incurred during the first three weeks. None of that, thank you very much.

It's quite simple: as an analyst I’d like to know if anything untoward happened the very next minute after the needle was pulled from somebody’s arm. Death from anaphylactic shock, for instance, by its very definition, should appear under the vaccinated category and not the unvaccinated! Not so with the definitions adopted by the government-protecting ONS, but then again they’re only doing their job.

For the analyses set out below I have included persons aged 12 years and older arriving in A&E in vaccinated vs. unvaccinated states that have been categorised into those receiving a respiratory diagnosis (and those not), and those receiving a respiratory procedure (and those not). There are tons of ingredients we are missing to offset a raft of confounding factors as long as your arm but I wanted to keep this as simple as possible. Before we start eyeballing slides I must stress that we are dealing with small sample sizes. These are not robust results by any means.

Respiratory Diagnosis by Vaccination Status

The first thing we should note here are the modest weekly sample sizes which ranged from 0 to 266 vaccinated admissions per week with a respiratory diagnosis (median sample size = 167.5 admissions per week). Unvaccinated admissions with a respiratory diagnosis ranged from 5 to 280 persons per week (median sample size = 70.5 admissions per week), hence look upon this slide as an item of interest rather than a result carved in stone:

We find a fascinating dynamic whereby the situation starts in much of a muchness, but ends with unvaccinated admissions tending to receive a respiratory diagnosis upon admission to A&E more often than their vaccinated counterparts. Interesting indeed! So why the flip from 2021/w17 (w/e 30 April) onward? We’re talking summer and low levels of coronavirus of any description, so why would these series diverge then and not during the winter peak? Most curious indeed and I can see that more delving into the data is required.

As for hypothesis testing not being a Bayesian boy, and not having access to a set of Bayesian spanners, I opted to run a rather more classical non-parametric test of significance on this data series, this being the Mann-Whitney U-test that was commonly found in medical papers of yesteryear. This indicated that these series most certainly should be treated as two different distributions (p<0.001). Fair comment.

Respiratory Procedure by Vaccination Status

We must note once again the very modest weekly sample sizes which ranged from 0 to 62 weekly vaccinated admissions requiring a respiratory procedure (median sample size = 38.5 admissions per week). Unvaccinated weekly admissions requiring such ranged from 1 to 92 persons (median sample size = 15.0 admissions per week), so again view this slide as interesting material rather than anything carved stone:

We find a fascinating dynamic whereby the situation starts and ends in much of a muchness, but for a while it was the vaccinated intake that appeared to require a respiratory procedure more often than their unvaccinated counterparts. However, a Mann-Whitney U-test indicated that these series should not be treated as two different distributions at the 95% level of confidence (p=0.728); that is, the difference your eyeballs is seeing could easily arise from a chance effect. Neither would I attach any significance to outliers owing to the small sample sizes.

It would have been handy if senior NHS spokespersons and certain medics had been honest about what they were dealing with instead of convincing the public that hospitals were brimming with respiratory illness of the unvaccinated; if they were brimming with such then these people were not being treated. An excellent summary of the diabolical situation has been penned by Professors Fenton & Neil.

Respiratory Severity Index by Vaccination Status

This is the one chart I really like to ponder on for it brings together the requirement to treat and the opportunity to treat in one statistic, this being the ratio of treated persons to diagnosed persons for vaccinated vs. unvaccinated intake suffering from respiratory illness:

If we ignore the wacko outliers prior to 2021/w1 my eyeballs suggest a persistent difference from 2021/w4 through to 2021/w36, which is supported by a Mann Whitney U-test (p<0.001). Those first few outliers will be throwing things but a Mann Whitney U-test for the period 2021/w1 onward still yielded a highly statistically significant result (p<0.001), so I think we can safely conclude that there is a difference, and it isn’t looking good for the vaccinated folk.

Since this ratio is a useful proxy measure for severity of respiratory illness, and since the vaccines are supposed to prevent hospitalisation and development of severe COVID, then I am forced to conclude that world governments ought to get their money back because the unvaccinated population have been faring just as well as their vaccinated counterparts.

Not only do the vaccines not stop transmission but they don’t prevent folk from ending up in A&E with respiratory conditions either; in fact, they seem to be making things worse. I’m going to bet that developers knew this from the beginning.

Kettle On!